The point of departure for this thesis is the inconsistency between national goals to conserve
farmland, and the local management of this natural resource, which prevents Norway from
complying with its national goals. The research question is: What role do party politics play
in the management of Norwegian land resources?
The state wants a high level of food security, and therefore needs land to be conserved for
food production purposes. On the other hand many municipalities are experiencing growth
and have needs for houses, industries, public buildings and infrastructure. According to theory
on multi-level democracy the state will apply hard governmental tools when there is a conflict
between national and local goals. Even though such a conflict exists in this case, I find that
local politicians have a relatively large room for manoeuvre in the management of farmland.
I expect the parties’ agricultural ideology and municipal ideology to play out in how local
politicians manage farmland. By content analysis of the party programs I place the parties
along these two cleavages and find that the political parties do differ considerably on how
strongly agricultural property should be regulated, and how much power should be
decentralised on issues concerning land use. Through a survey question on land use in the
seventh round of the Norwegian Citizen Panel I further find that respondents differ in the
same way as the parties they would vote for along the cleavage of agricultural ideology. Still,
regression analysis on farmland conversion in Norwegian municipalities shows that none of
the cleavages have a statistically significant effect on the local management of farmland.
To find out why this is not the case, I execute a comparative case study of the two
municipalities of Spydeberg and Hobøl. They are chosen through a Most Similar Systems
Design as they are equal in every geographic and demographic respect, but they converted a
very different amount of farmland in the four-year-period before and after 2011. Both also
experienced a change in party leadership in 2011, and therefore reflect the apparent lacking
party effect on local management of farmland. By interviewing politicians and others working
with farmland conversion, I find that most of them consider party politics to be very important
locally, even though it is not reflected in how much farmland that is actually converted. The
main finding of the thesis is that conservation of farmland is weighted in a local context, not
in a party political one.